Asian characters in IE 8 get garbled in Server; is this due to HTTP header Content-Type?

Question

One of the request parameters in an http request made by the client contains Japanese characters. If I make this request in Firefox and look at the parameter as soon as it reaches the server by debugging in Eclipse, the characters look fine. If I do the same request using IE 8, the characters get garbled when I look at them at the same point in the server code (they are fine in both browsers, though). I have examined the POST requests made by both browsers, and they both pass the same sequence of characters, which is:

%2C%E3%81%9D%E3%81%AE%E4%BB%96

I am therefore thinking that this has to do with the encoding. If I look at the HTTP headers of the request, I notice the following differences. In IE:

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: */*

In Firefox:

Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

I'm thinking that the IE 8 header doesn't state the UTF-8 encoding explicitly, even though it's specified in the meta tag of the HTML document. I am not sure if this is the problem. I would appreciate any help, and please do let me know if you need more information.

Answer 1

Make sure the page that contains the form has UTF-8 as charset. In IE's case, the best thing to make sure of this is by sending a HTTP header ('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8') and adding a meta http-equiv tag with the content type/charset to your html (I've seen this actually matter, even when the appropriate header was sent).

Second, your form can also specify the content type:

<form enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8>